What’s the point of having 2 scrollbar types in Ubuntu 12.04?

April 27, 2012 3:14 am

With free software operating systems, a popular practice is to install, out of the box, more than one application for the same computing task. For new users, it is a good thing, since it made it possible for them to test-drive the best applications that their distribution has to offer.

The only downside to the practice is the extra disk space used by the duplicate applications. However, given that nobody complains about lack of disk space, the downside is not really something to fret about. Even at that, the practice is being scaled back – especially with the most popular distributions.

While we can excuse developers for installing more than one application for the same computing task, there is no excuse for what Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is doing with the scrollbar.

For reasons that do not make sense, the scrollbar has become a distraction in the minds of the folks responsible for Ubuntu. So they came up with a new type of scrollbar called the overlay- or Ayatana scrollbar.

Their reason(s)? “To ensure that scrollbars take up no active screen real-estate,” and “improve the users ability to focus on content and applications,” while “reducing the waste of space and distracting clutter that a traditional scrollbar entails.”

Seriously?! A scrollbar takes up too much space and is a “distracting clutter.”

So the solution is to replace the traditional scrollbar shown below…

With this one, so that “a thumb appears magically when the pointer is in proximity to the scrollbar, for easy desktop-style paging and dragging.”

But the problem with the overlay-scrollbar is not just that it is annoying, but that both scrollbars are active on your Ubuntu desktop. With third-party applications (Firefox and LibreOffice, for example), you get the traditional scrollbar, while on native GNOME/Unity applications, you get the annoying or overlay-scrollbar. Beam me up, Scotty.

So, what can you do about the overlay scrollbar? Well, if, like me, you find it annoying, remove it. How? From a shell terminal, type sudo apt-get remove liboverlay-scrollbar3-0.2-0. Or from the Software Center, search for “scrollbar” and uninstall it from there. Restore scrollbar-sanity to your Ubuntu 12.04 desktop.

Google has got competition, because Presearch is building a blockchain-based search engine controlled by the community. At $0.15 a token, you can participation in Lot 3 of the token sale by clicking here

Open Money is building a solution that will run mainstream software on blockchain tech. Click here to get free tokens that will be the digital currency of the platform

Thanks for this tip. These scrollbars have been driving me mad. As well as hitting a 2-pixel-wide scrollbar with your mouse, you then have to position it again onto the drag widget thingy (stop me if I’m getting too technical). Has everyone forgotten Fitts’ law?

One reason I use Unix is that I can expect my tools to remain consistent over time. This is an aspect of “UI consistency” that is far too often overlooked. I should not have to relearn interfaces after every major release.

To play devil’s advocate, I seldom use the scroll bar to, you know, scroll. The vast majority of the time I’m either using page up/down or the scroll wheel on the mouse, so having a very small scroll bar indicating where I am in a document is more useful to me than a big clickable scroll bar that I never click on. Just some thoughts from the other side of the camp.

Also, I do believe that the reason LibreOffice and Firefox have a different scrollbar is because they’re using a different windowing toolkit for stuff?

Please disregard the comment of the user named “Su” below. Admin please remove his/her comment. Probably an iPad3 user who is wondering what to do with the expensive iPad3, by posting random comment on blogs which he/she thinks is Mac related.

Back to topic, the overlay scrollbar is an abomination. The only purpose of such a stupid design is to highlight the excellent design of the traditional scrollbar.

I bet Mark Shuttlework himself uninstalls that horrible overlay scrollbar on his personal machine.

There are two scrollbars because Unity is a shell built on GNOME 3 and when you remove Ubuntu’s overlay scrollbar then you get GNOME’s. Having two scrollbars is not the plan since only one is from Ubuntu.

BTW, I do not like the overlay scrollbar or global menu and remove both first thing.